History

Our Company History

The Axiom Story: How a Philosopher Came to Develop Software

by Dr. Curt Naser

Having spent over 10 years working with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), I saw the need and potential for an efficient and affordable online compliance management system. I knew that I needed a program that would dynamically generate web pages and web forms from a database. My initial efforts resulted in a system that I put to use as IRB Chair for Fairfield University, which has since grown into a full-blown research compliance, faculty reporting, and workflow management system.

Over the years, my course management and faculty reporting systems became the dominant pedagogical and administrative support systems for my campus. Like many of my colleagues, I became frustrated with IT systems and support that could not provide all of the services that the faculty and administrative staff needed. Rather than demanding change, I built it myself and became the go-to person for all manner of data reporting.

Three things drove me forward in what turned out to be a massive stint of programming:

The intellectual challenges of developing reports and data systems to meet a wide variety of needs

My unique perspective as a faculty member with some administrative responsibility and a programmer, which gave me insight into exactly what my colleagues and peers needed.

The highly rewarding experience of meeting the needs of others.

In 2009, I partnered with industry experts and founded Axiom Education to bring this work to market. With funding and a great deal of sweat equity from my partners and Connecticut Innovations, we rebuilt the entire system in the Amazon cloud. Since then we have served over 50 client institutions world-wide. Each client is different and we work very hard to make sure that our systems are as flexible as possible to meet their needs. If we don’t have a feature, we build it.

The demands of continuous improvement of a complex, commercial system led to Axiom creating a development team, so I don’t program anymore. I remain the person who translates the needs of our clients into the design of the software and the services we provide. We are a Software as a Service (SaaS) company and, for my part, it is the service that really counts.